Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. This episode continues our podcast road trip to Washington, D.C., which took place earlier this month in conjunction with our annual tech policy summit. Today's topic is all about the blockchain in Congress, moderated by A6 and Z policy team partner, Matthew Colford.

We're recording from Capitol Hill. I'm here with Congressman Jared Polis from Colorado and Congressman

David Schweikert from Arizona, along with Mike Lempress, who's the chief legal and risk officer

for Coinbase. So let's get started. What is the average perception among members of Congress

of blockchain and cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin? Well, this is Jared Bullis.

I think people still turn their heads and say, what's that?

I think there's some awareness of Bitcoin, for instance, or online currencies.

But outside of our caucus members and perhaps a few members of Congress that have an engineering

or computer science background, I don't think we're quite there yet in explaining what

this is to people.

Yeah.

It's one of our great difficulties is so often when we actually say,

hey, distributive ledger can provide all these types of solutions in our society.

They immediately want to talk about Bitcoin.

And, you know, that's both wonderful, but at the same time,

the underlying technology is so much

broader than just a cryptocurrency and trying to walk through saying, okay, let me explain

the stamping of nodes and, you know, the matching and permission and levels of permission.

And you get a couple moments, and Jared and I get into that, and about two minutes into it,

they're just staring at us.

And I assume a lot of people, when you say Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, the first thing I think about is this dark web, or if you say blockchain, like the first thing I think about is...

Well, it might not even be that sophisticated. Keep in mind the demographics around here. I mean, we have a tough time explaining cloud computing. I mean, you know, this is a challenge. Now, what members of Congress have,

...